How Do You Know

How Do You Know

Directed by James L. Brooks

Runtime: 116 min.

From the fake childhood scenes that open James L. Brooks’ How Do You Know, you can see right through director Brooks’ machinations. Seeing pre-teen Lisa Jorgenson (eventually played by Reese Witherspoon) demonstrate athletic prowess at a Little League batting practice where she intimidates an inept little boy jock was unbearably cute—too much like the utterly fake opening of Brooks’ Broadcast News that introduced Holly Hunter’s annoyingly smart, obnoxiously ambitious character. Not only is Brooks repeating a bad idea, he doesn’t complete it. When Witherspoon finally embodies Lisa as a 30-year-old bachelorette-jock, her skills do not intimidate star athlete Matty (Owen Wilson) or financial pro George (Paul Rudd). Brooks’ intro turns out not to be a prophetic distillation of Lisa’s persona and life path; it’s just a lame gimmick.

Too much shorthand—bad lessons learned from Brooks’ TV apprenticeship— traduces How Do You Know’s potential. It could replace the silliness of movies that usually star Katherine Heigl or Jennifer Aniston with Brooks’ almost patented behavioral acuity. But, somehow, Brooks seems unnerved. His keen grasp of everyday neuroses keeps turning into shtick and forced cleverness, like the early scene in which Lisa’s teammate smirks at their coach, “Oh, excuse me. I forgot how to smile around bastards.” It’s so poorly timed that the insult overwhelmed any believable sense of camaraderie.

Brooks falls back on TV habits— probably because he’s attempting something riskier than just big-screen sitcom. How Do You Know forges a difficult exploration of its characters’ weaknesses and uncertainties. But its deepening drama becomes wishy-washy. In contradiction of Brooks’ glib set-up, the grown-up, professional women’s league ballplayer Lisa is a guy-magnet—and dyke-magnet, too, from the look of her unexplored teammates. Romantic problems arise because, in fact, her post-feminist male suitors are not overawed by her skills: Matty admires her fitness and sexual athleticism; George is smitten by her girlish naturalness and jock fortitude. (She instinctively balls her fist when George suddenly grabs her, the damnedest thing in a romcom since Cary Grant balled his fist at Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story.) Brooks plots a battle of the sexes where well-heeled, intelligent people cannot conquer their advantages.

Lisa and George can’t control their fate: She ages out of sports; he’s duped by his boss—his own father (Jack Nicholson doing a Vincent Gardenia impersonation). And Matty is too smart and candid for his own playboy good. They’re not dysfunctional physically or romantically, yet they’re estranged from their own desires. Their flaw is that they’re contrived, not life-like. Brooks has written characters who don’t fit his concept’s slots—even though he is a near-genius at expressing the tiny confusions and quirks that describe personality. (Matty: “Is it OK if I ask you that?” Lisa: “Stop asking me, it’s weird.”) How Do You Know fails, but it fails somewhere between imitating a Wes Anderson movie and a Nora Ephron movie. Brooks’ humanism—which reached a notable peak in Spanglish— describes the difficulties Lisa, George, Matty and George’s father have getting past themselves to show love to an Other—the basic Anderson theme. But Brooks’ filmmaking ineptitude situates his characters in an artificial setting (too brightly lit by Janusz Kaminski) without the tension of real-world experience—the basic Ephron insult. How Do You Know teases Lisa’s self-sufficiency, Matty’s vanity and George’s excess compassion as if those traits explain what makes them lovelorn. It’s what makes them glorified sitcom figures. They inhabit a backlot world (Lisa and George rendezvous at a lustrous street curb bus stop) where fake and fantasy clash with Brooks’ psychological realism. In his superb Spanglish, Brooks was able to combine both his Hollywood and civilian experience, creating a near-masterpiece of social criticism and moral and ethnic scrutiny. Adam Sandler, Téa Leoni, Cloris Leachman and Paz Vega created undeniable characterizations but Witherspoon, Rudd and Wilson all seem artificial: overtanned and stressed. Only Nicholson and Rudd have felt moments—especially a son-tofather confrontation about shouting.

Ultimate proof of Brooks’ over-thought, indefinite romanticism is his seduction motif: Teddy Pendergrass’ recording “Turn Off the Lights.” Rudd hums the song in loveable mode, yet it pathetically recalls the Pendergrass songs that Alan Rudolph used throughout Choose Me, the 1984 analysis of romantic neuroses—the most profound screwball comedy since the genre’s heyday. Rudolph’s invocation of Pendergrass was inspired; fetishizing TP’s seductive mastery, to which all of Western pop feels drawn yet intimidated, created an authentic testament to our modern lovelorn idiosyncrasy. Had Brooks been more certain of what he wanted How Do You Know to convey about the mystery of falling in love, confident in his own sense of emotional transparency (no doubt Spanglish’s flop was a confidence-killer), he might have found another musical expression as original as Rudolph’s. Given his love triangle’s endless back-and-forth and Brooks’ artistic desperation, Nicki Minaj’s sing-songy litany of the mysteries of love “Right Through Me” might have been ideal.